You assert that I would do better to pursue such or such a career, to work according to your process, to employ an iron in place of a wooden plough, to sow thin in place of sowing thick, to purchase in the East rather than in the West. I maintain just the contrary. I have made all my calculations; and surely I am more interested than you in not falling into any mistake in matters upon the right ordering of which my welfare, my existence, and the happiness of my family depend, while in your case they interest only your amour-propre and the credit of your systems. Give me as much advice as you please, but constrain me to nothing. I decide upon my own proper risk and peril, and surely that is enough without the tyrannical intervention of law.
We see that, in almost all the important actions of life, it is necessary to respect free will, to rely on the individual judgment of men, on that inward light which God has given them for their guidance, and after that to leave Responsibility to do its own work.
The intervention of law in analogous cases, over and above the very great inconvenience of opening the way equally to error and to truth, has the still greater inconvenience of paralyzing intelligence itself, of extinguishing that light which is the inheritance of humanity and the pledge of progress.
But even when an action, a habit, a practice is acknowledged by public good sense to be bad, vicious, and immoral, when it is so beyond doubt; when those who give themselves up to it are the first to blame themselves,—that is not enough to justify the intervention of law. As I have already said, it is necessary also to know if, in adding to the bad consequences of this vice the bad consequences inherent in all legal repression, we do not produce, in the long-run, a sum of evil which exceeds the good which the legal sanction adds to the natural sanction.
We might examine, for instance, the evils which would result [p483] from the application of the legal sanction to the repression of idleness, prodigality, avarice, egotism, cupidity, ambition.
Let us take the case of idleness.
This is a very natural inclination, and there are not wanting men who join the chorus of the Italians when they celebrate the dolce far niente, and of Rousseau, when he says, Je suis paresscux avec délices. We cannot doubt, then, that idleness is attended with a certain amount of enjoyment. Were it not so, in fact, there would be no idleness in the world.
And yet there flows from this inclination a host of evils, so much so that the wisdom of nations has embodied itself in the proverb that Idleness is the parent of every vice.
The evils of idleness infinitely surpass the good; and it is necessary that the law of Responsibility should act in this matter with some energy, either as a lesson or as a spur, seeing that it is in fact by labour that the world has reached the state of civilisation which it has now attained.
Now, considered either as a lesson or as a spur to action, what would a legal sanction add to the providential sanction? Suppose we had a law to punish idleness. In what precise degree would such a law quicken the national activity?